Re: Concurrency, again

[Richard Stallman]

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I thought that "concurrency" and "parallelism" were the same.
I don't understand the distinction you are making.

I think the main use of parallelism in Emacs would be to make some
commands asynchronous.  Currently, the only way a command can be
asynchronous is if it runs in a separate process.  With some rather
unsophisticated parallelism, commands written in Lisp could 
be made asynchronous.

The easy way to support this would be to provide special constructs
that can be used to make a particular program able to run
asynchronously.  Such programs could run in parallel with any and all
ordinary Lisp programs.

It would not be necessary to allow two ordinary Lisp programs to run
in parallel.  In other words, it would be ok if Emacs allowed only one
ordinary program at any time -- alongside any number of special
asynchronous programs.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.